The singular versus the plural readers of Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq

This article reads the narrative contract in Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq’s pivotal 1855 novel al-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq (Leg Over Leg). Borrowing from Barthes’s idea of narrative contract, I argue that the many narrator apostrophes to the reader do not relate to issues of plot, as in some fictions, but to test the reader’s endurance. In exchange, the reader gains a promised reward of philological mastery. Yet by the end of al-Sāq, the nature of the contract collapses. This authorial admission reflects the material reality of the text’s circulation at the time when al-Shidyāq was the freest and the least enmeshed in a larger structure of knowledge production. The article then pivots to the plural readers of al-Shidyāq’s newspaper al-Jawāʾib. While most scholarly attention has focused on al-Sāq, this essay opens onto broader questions of the newspaper-novel nexus and how nineteenth-century Arabic writing imagines its reading public and fosters such narrative contracts.